There has never been a snowier December measured in Syracuse

John Berry / The Post-StandardColorful art at the corner of Montgomery and E. Fayette Streets can't distract anyone from the reality that as of Friday, Syracuse set the record for the snowiest December on record. As of 10 p.m. 70.9 inches of snow had fallen during the month, breaking the record for snowfall in the month of December of 70.3 inches, which was set in 2000.

Syracuse, NY -- This is Central New York’s snowiest December ever. By 10 p.m. Friday enough snow fell to push the total for the month to 70.9 inches, six-tenths of an inch more than fell in all of December 2000, the previous record holder.

It hasn’t been any single day’s accumulation that has made December so hard on the record books, said Jon Hitchcock, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Buffalo. “The key was how persistent it was.”

It has snowed 14 out of the past 17 days. The single biggest accumulation came on Dec. 8, when 14.9 inches were measured by National Weather Service instruments at Syracuse Hancock International Airport.

The key to that persistence was a high pressure system near Greenland that blocked storm systems, Hitchcock said. The storm that struck the first weekend of the month and the one that hit this past week got stuck over Quebec, he said, and just kept spinning around, sending northwest winds from Canada across Lake Ontario where they picked up enough moisture to bury Central New York.

“It’s kind of the classic weather pattern in Upstate New York,” he said.

The storm systems never made it around the high pressure system, Hitchcock said, they just kind of grew weaker and fell apart.

file photoHow much is 70.8 inches of snow? Dwight Eisenhower, left, shown with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the general who led the Allies in Europe in World War II and was twice elected president of the United States, stood 5-foot, 10 and one half inches tall, four-tenths of an inch less than the amount of snow measured so far this month at Syracuse Hancock International Airport.

The decline of the latest system comes just in time for the weekend, and Brian Lovejoy, a hydrometeorological technician with the National Weather Service in Binghamton, suggested people make the most of it. He said the weather will be mostly dry thanks to a high pressure system reaching from the Southern Plains to the Mid-Atlantic states. “It’ll be a good weekend to do things that people need to do,” he said.

Hitchcock held out hope that next week won’t bring another barrage of lake-effect snow. Temperatures in the air around 5,000 feet will be a little too warm to turn Lake Ontario moisture into snow, he said.

Hitchcock offered reassurance about one other thing: It may not be warm enough to bring heavy lake-effect snow to the region, but it won’t be warm enough to melt away the 15-inch snowpack that has built up in Central New York since December began.